Play Loud, Play Quiet - a journey in music

Broadcast:

Friday 15 March 2013 11:05PM

Craig Schuftanis a writer and radio producer from Sydney, Australia, currently living in Berlin. He is the author of three books on music and popular culture, including The Culture Club (2007), Hey! Nietzsche! Leave Them Kids Alone! (2009) and Entertain Us! (2012), a history of alternative rock in the nineties. As a producer, Craig worked for over ten years at Australia’s national youth broadcaster, triple j, where he presented the popular podcast series The Culture Club, created the station’s long-running ‘We Love Music’ idents, and produced many other programs, including The J-Files, Today Today, The Race Race, House Party, Acceptable in the 80s and Into The 90s. In 2010 he won an ARIA award for his work on the comedy series The Blow Parade.

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About Play Loud, Play Quiet

Craig writes - I spent most of 2010 and 2011 researching and writing a book about Alternative music in the 90s. I listened to hundreds of songs and albums, and hours and hours of interviews, taken from radio archives or sourced from fan communities online. Most of these found their way into the book in some form. But at the same time as I was writing, I started to plan a listenable version of the same story, more impressionistic than factual, where some of the more oblique connections between certain pieces of music, certain phrases and ideas used by artists in interviews might be teased out in a way that the written word can’t quite manage. I imagined a cross between a DJ mixtape and a radio documentary, where the listener is transported back to a time and place by fragments of old songs, and then brought into a closer relationship with those songs by hearing the people who created them, telling their stories in their own words. The result is this mix, part one of four, which deals with the early 90s, from the optimism of the Madchester moment in England, through the rise of Grunge and Alternative Rock in America, and the growing disillusionment with this music following its mainstream success, in both England and America.

“What happened when Alternative music first came out was authentic, it was a reflection of what was happening at the time and it had to do with Authenticity.”

“We’re in the reflection of the authenticity now. This is the reflection.”

A collage of stolen moments from the alternative rock boom and subsequent bust, 1990-1993, by Craig Schuftan.

0.00: Cool Rock Tunes (Intro) Featuring Kim Deal and Black Francis.

0.22: Doing What We Want.

‘1990 is proving to be the year the eighties forgot,’ wrote NME’s Simon Williams, ‘the resurgence of the underdogs.‘ Such was the mood of optimism that even a baggy-by-numbers racket like Blur could be considered future hit- makers. ‘Randall, or whatever his name is, has definite star potential,’ wrote Melody Maker. The old guard seemed finally to be making room for the new, and the future of music looked as though it was in good hands. ‘It’s gonna be really nice,’ said Mark Gardener from Ride,‘when you can put the radio on in the daytime, and maybe every other record is good, whereas for ages it’s been a load of shit.’

‘We put MTV into East Berlin,’ said Viacom’s Sumner Redstone in January 1990, ‘and six months later the wall came down.’ To consolidate this victory, and leave viewers in no doubt that revolutions in pop were inextricably linked to — if not solely responsible for — changes in global politics, MTV began broadcasting a new station promo later that year. The viewer was shown brief highlights from the network’s playlist — Snap!’s ‘The Power’, Deee-Lite’s ‘Groove is in the Heart’, Aztec Camera’s ‘The Crying Scene’, Iggy Pop’s duet with Kate Pierson, ‘Candy’, and a new song by Faith No More, ‘Falling To Pieces’. Faith No More’s livewire singer Mike Patton leered into the camera, as the voice-over guy drove home the message. ‘New sounds,’ he said, in a voice usually reserved for Bruce Willis movies, ‘for a new world.‘

Soon, US forces were massing in the Persian Gulf, and the president’s earlier talk of a purely ‘defensive’ mission had modulated into a declaration of war. Shortly after Bush addressed the nation, Rolling Stone’s Michael Azerrad stood side of stage at the UK’s Reading Festival, and watched the Pixies play a song with only one lyric line — ‘it is time for stormy weather’— repeated over and over again. ‘Hearing it played during the Persian Gulf crisis is eerie,’ wrote Azerrad. ‘Hearing it played to 50,000 kids with no future is downright chilling.‘ The crowd might be in face paint and love beads, but the Third Summer of Love, Azerrad felt, was fading fast.

Like their friends in Mudhoney, the members of Nirvana had a keen sense of irony — they knew rock and roll was clichéd and stupid, but had decided to keep doing it anyway. And yet this new offering, Novoselic felt, was a little bit too stupid. The song was basically ‘Louie Louie’ — the old bar-band staple — played fast and loud. As such, it also bore a strong resemblance to Boston’s FM rock radio classic ‘More Than a Feeling’, which was also derived from ‘Louie Louie’. Cobain was happy with both of these associations, but Novoselic told him he thought the song was a joke, which only seemed to make the singer more determined to make something of it. The new tune might have been a joke, but he had a feeling it was, at the very least, a good one.

‘This year,’ wrote Rolling Stone’s Jon Katz, ‘everyone wants to be alternative.’ Attendance for Perry Farrell’s Lollapalooza almost tripled, with over 40,000 people turning out to see Soundgarden, Ministry, Pearl Jam and the Red Hot Chili Peppers at San Francisco’s Shoreline Amphitheatre. For Farrell, the meaning of this was clear. ‘What Lollapalooza 2 has proved,’ he said, ‘is that there is a serious market for a youth counterculture. That’s the bad news.’

31.00: A Giant Dildo Crushing the Sun. Contains elements of: Beck ‘Pay No Mind (Snoozer)’, Faith No More ‘Mid Life Crisis’, House of Pain ‘Jump Around’.

32.30: Mega Distribution.

For L7‘s Jennifer Finch, as for many in America’s indie underground, there was no contradiction in being a punk band on a major label. Indie had never really been anti-consumerist, but had rather promoted what Simon Frith refers to as a ‘people’s version of consumerism’, founded on the idea that record buyers had a right to real choice outside of market manipulation. ‘People are tired of listening to the stuff they usually have to listen to on the radio,’ Finch told triple j’s Michael Tunn. ‘They wanna hear new, different stuff — a variety, as it were.’

By 1992, many alternative rock bands had attracted the ‘wider audience’ their adherents had always insisted they deserved. But by the following year, most of these bands were hoping this new audience would go away. The problem was one of definition. Alternative rock had, for almost a decade, defined itself by its oppositional stance toward mainstream values. ‘I’m different, I’m special, nobody likes me,’ as Kim Thayil put it. ‘That worked for us for years.‘ But the success of Nirvana had upset this system. Dave Grohl noticed new faces at the band’s gigs from almost the moment ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ went into MTV rotation: ‘That guy looks like a jock,’ the drummer thought to himself. ‘What’s he doing here? Hmmm, maybe this video thing is attracting some ... riff raff!’

‘Rock and roll has become an artificial experience,’ complained the Pixies’ Black Francis. In 1988, Billy Corgan met D’Arcy Wretzky at a concert by the Dan Reed Network. ‘You can tell this band was put together by a record company,’ said Corgan, as they stood outside after the show. The songwriter knew he was watching a choreographed performance by a fake rock band when he saw the way the singer moved onstage. ‘Real people in bands don’t jump around like that,’ he insisted.

On the first day of the 1995 Lollapalooza tour, at The Gorge natural amphitheatre in Washington, an unprecedented event took place. ‘All moshing stopped,’ reported MTV’s Alison Stewart, in a tone of voice journalists usually reserved for earthquakes and death tolls in foreign wars. The crowd had been stilled by Sinéad O’Connor, performing a set of songs taken from her new album, Universal Mother. The singer was very pleased with the response. ‘I wanted to calm people down,’ she told Stewart. ‘So if I did that, I’m happy.’ For the festival’s organiser, Perry Farrell, the secret was in the way the singer held her notes. ‘When you sing,’ he told O’Connor, ‘you don’t use a lot of vibrato. It was so nice to hear that.’ Gesticulating wildly to illustrate his point, Farrell explained that most singers duck and weave around the note because they’re insecure, not just about their singing, but about themselves. ‘The note,’ he insisted, ‘is you.’